


Dead Sisters

by Ember_Keelty



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Amell was not the Warden, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mages and Templars, No Anders without Justice, Rite of Tranquility, Templar Carver Hawke, pre-Hawke/Anders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-03 00:28:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11520696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ember_Keelty/pseuds/Ember_Keelty
Summary: Four interconnected character vignettes, set during Act 2, about some of the major players in Kirkwall and a shared grief handled with widely varying levels of constructiveness.





	Dead Sisters

One silverite gauntlet tangles in the girl's dark hair and another cups her chin, thumb pressed against her lips. Hawke's mind throws up its defenses because _nightmare, I recognize this nightmare_. The demons still trot it out on occasion, even after four years of it being obviously impossible. It _has_ been four years, and this girl can't be a day over twenty, and Bethany would be older by now, except she isn't because she's gone — head smashed blood forming clumps in her hair and in the dirt it happened so fast and was she dead before the battle even started or was she lying there waiting for help that never came? — but this isn't Bethany this isn't a dream this is real it's really happening right now right in front of her.

Hawke reaches out to Anders without thinking, without even looking, unable to tear her eyes away from the Templars and turn her head to face him. Her hand connects with something warm and downy. Feathers. Feather pauldrons. Anders.

"No," he says, and a chill goes down Hawke's spine at the despair in his voice. "No, this is their place. We cannot." Her hand clenches, fingers digging roughly into his shoulder. This is _no one's_ place, and anyone who would do this has no place anywhere, no right even to continue to exist. Anders is the first person she's ever met who knows that and isn't afraid to say it, so how could he betray her now?

When she rounds on him, though, she realizes that he isn't talking to her. He's curled in on himself, Fade light crackling through his skin, arms crossed over his chest like he's trying to keep something from bursting out. Anders has told her why he fears his own anger, but right now, Hawke doesn't care. She wouldn't care if Justice erupted in flames that devoured everything between himself and Ser Alrik. She wouldn't care if he tore through her and used her own blood to power his blind rampage. She just doesn't want to watch this. She can't watch this and live.

Hawke used to imagine that if the Templars ever came for her family, she would die before she let them touch Bethany. She would stand and fight them, or draw their attention and then run off on her own to make them chase her. It was a promise she made to herself, but never out loud to Bethany, because Bethany already felt guilty enough just for existing — but also because saying it would make it a boast, and boasts are rarely followed through. She wonders now whether Bethany ever made herself the same promise. When it was darkspawn that came instead of Templars, Bethany followed through, and Hawke didn't.

This isn't Bethany, but those _are_ Templars. Nothing ever seems to go quite the way Hawke imagines it, but some things come close in ways she isn't prepared for.

"Get your hands off her!"

Shouting and charging isn't a decision she makes in a single, discernable moment. Something inside of her boils over, and then it's just happening. There is lightning, and then Anders is beside her and there is fire too. The Templars bear down on them with their swords, but Hawke unleashes a blast of force magic that sends most of them flying back into the thunderstorm-inferno.

Only Alrik manages to push through it. He raises a hand to her, and suddenly she is burning from the inside, choking on invisible flames that consume her mana like kindling. Her feet go out from under her, and her back hits the ground with bruising force.

The bastard stands above her and lifts his sword. Hawke flinches as he brings it down, closes her eyes and hates herself for the show of weakness as the blade cuts into her neck and a spray of hot blood seeps into her robes.

She hears sounds that she doesn't know words for, then. _Crunching_ and _squelching_ don't quite cover it. The air around her fills with heat and the stench of seared flesh.

Hawke opens her eyes. It takes her a moment to understand how, when she knows that the sword fell on her.

The sword _fell_ on her. Alrik is still hovering over her, his hands empty, his arms hanging limp at his sides. Anders holds him up by what's left of his head, blood dripping down from a skull crushed between bare hands. That's where most of the spray came from. The cut on her neck is a shallow one — it just stings like the Void.

Hawke pulls herself to her feet as Anders tosses the corpse aside. The magical maelstrom fades away to reveal Alrik's lackeys lying dead on the ground, their armor scorched and melted, their bodies twitching with the last few flashing sparks. The girl they were threatening is unscathed. She's curled up against the wall and staring in obvious horror, but alive and out of their grasp.

"They will die! I will have every last Templar for these abuses!" Anders declares in Justice's voice, a voice that reverberates through Hawke to set her bones shivering and her blood humming. Some strange power in it calls to the pain and desperate rage she has spent her whole life trying to bury, stirring them up to the surface.

"We'll kill them all, I promise," she reassures him. It isn't boasting, because just look at the start they've already made.

—

Most of the other Templars Carver meets talk about mages like they're all the same. "The only good mage is a dead one," is something he's actually heard some of them say, in that many words, after a suicide or failed Harrowing lightens their workload. He has to bite his tongue, but it isn't as hard as he worried it would be. They're wrong, and Carver _knows_ that they're wrong, but maybe not as wrong as he once believed.

Father was a blood mage. Sure, he had his reasons, but ask any Gallows mage who turned to blood magic and they'd tell you they had their reasons, too. He was still a good man, on the whole, but it's freeing for Carver to realize that he may have been better off without the sort of attention he always envied his sisters getting.

Marian? Marian is a lowlife. Oh, she's his sister and he loves her — and he knows she loves him too, no matter how stubbornly she refuses to answer his letters — but now that he's gotten some distance, the shadow she casts doesn't look quite as long as it once did. She's a common criminal, and apparently she likes being a criminal, because from everything he's heard, she's still playing games with the city's underworld even now that she has money and a title. Carver has grown up and moved on. He's working for the good of society instead of pointlessly struggling against it. Marian may have all of the Amell wealth and influence, but what's she doing with her life aside from causing trouble that responsible people like him have to clean up after?

None of that means she deserves to be locked up, obviously. Carver would never lift a hand to his own sister, and he wouldn't let anyone else hurt her either. But in an _entirely hypothetical_ fight, he probably could take her now, after all the training he's had in combatting magic. He'd be lying if he said he wasn't a little bit proud of that.

But... Bethany was different. Bethany was almost too good of a person for him to tolerate. She made him feel inadequate in an entirely different way from the other mages in his family, and he isn't even the slightest bit glad that he doesn't have to feel like that anymore.

Sometimes when he thinks of her, a traitorous little voice in his head that sounds an awful lot like Marian parrots the words of his colleagues in a mocking tone, _The only good mage is a dead one_ , until he's tempted to bash his own brains out just to shut it up. Other times he's hit with an overwhelming sense that if he turns his face to look she'll be standing there beside him, just like she was for most of his life since either of them were old enough to stand.

Once, he gives in to the feeling and turns to look at just the right moment to see a flick of long black hair and a flash of magic — not _right_ next to him, but not far away, either. Without thinking, he crosses the courtyard to where she and a group of other apprentices are practicing their staffwork. She's not Bethany, obviously, and doesn't even look all that much like her from up close. Carver doesn't know what to do with himself now that he's here, so he just stands around watching awkwardly until the exercise finishes and the apprentices are escorted back to their quarters.

Her name is Lena, which Carver learns when he asks one of the guards he saw escorting them. It's a stupid whim that he immediately regrets acting on.

"I could arrange for her to get 'lost,'" the more senior Templar says with an overly chummy smile. "What's in it for me?"

"What?"

The other Templar chuckles indulgently. " _That_ new, are you? Well, if you need a hint... lyrium's always good. Money works too, same here as anywhere else. Doubt you're in any position to be returning favors in kind, but you could just owe me one. I'm nice like that."

Carver feels his skin crawl under his armor. "Shove your favors! You've got the wrong idea, so just... no. No!"

"Corrupting the new recruits, Ser Clayton?" comes a dry voice from just behind Carver, who whirls around to see that the bloody Knight-Captain has snuck up on them.

"I'm _trying_ ," says Clayton. "But I'm worried this one's as much of a prude as you are. Oi, recruit, here's a cautionary tale for you! Our dear Knight-Captain comes from Ferelden, yeah? There was this girl in his Circle there he was pining after for more than a year, but he never did anything about it. And now he can't shut up about her! And the Gallows makes any other post look cushy, right? We'd _all_ go mad here if we weren't allowed to blow off some steam now and then."

"You are _allowed_ no such thing." The Knight-Captain's face flushes from the top of his brow to the tip of his chin, but other than that, his expression remains so carefully blank that Carver can't tell whether the redness is from anger or embarrassment. "Watch your tongue around your superior officers."

"Yes, Ser!" Clayton crosses his arms in salute and then saunters off.

"I apologize for that," the Knight-Captain says once he's gone. "Sadly, not every knight in the order is a model of integrity and discipline."

"Is that it?" Carver asks in disbelief. "You're not going to sack him or anything?"

"I wish things were that simple. But no, we're undermanned as it is. As long as he does his job..." He sees the look on Carver's face and sighs. "You have to understand the enormity of the threat we face here, Ser-"

"Carver," says Carver, then kicks himself mentally. "Hawke. Carver Hawke."

"Ser Hawke. The reason I 'never shut up about' the Amell girl from the Lake Calenhad Circle is that it _is_ a cautionary tale." Carver flinches at the name, but the Knight-Captain doesn't seem to notice. There's a faraway look in his eyes. "She was beautiful, intelligent, confident, and tactful. She wasn't like the others. At least, that was how it seemed to me. My superiors... they saw the way I cared for her. They put me there at her Harrowing, gave me orders to... be the one to hold the sword, should she fail. But of course she didn't fail. She was too _good_ for that." He barks out a short, self-deprecating laugh. "The very next day, she helped a known maleficar escape from the tower. He smashed his phylactery and injured four Templars and the First Enchanter on his way out. Solona Amell stood with him through all of it. I thought at first there must have been some mistake, that the blood mage was controlling her, but... that proved not to be the case.

"She was executed, of course. I had to hold the sword after all. And all the way to the end she just kept babbling like a madwoman. Justifying her actions. Justifying _his_ actions. I don't know what came over her, whether she was possessed or just snapped, but she was not herself. I... choose to believe that it was a mercy, what I did for her. I like to think that the girl she used to be when she was in her right mind would have understood."

Carver doesn't know what to say. When he opens his mouth to try to get something out, he finds that it's gone dry and closes it again.

That was one of Cousin Revka's children, then. Mother always wondered what became of them, but he doesn't think he'll pass this revelation on to her. There's no reason she should know. There's no reason _he_ should know. What does he get out of knowing that a cousin of his he's never met went crazy and died?

And why is he surprised? That seems to be how it is with most mages, judging by what he's seen so far here in Kirkwall. His father and sisters are the exception, not the rule.

Lena, it turns out, is no exception. She doesn't even get a Harrowing, so no one makes Carver hold the sword. No one makes him hold the brand, either, because that takes a steadier hand than he has yet. He just holds Lena herself against the table while the others chain her down.

"Ser Hawke, isn't it?" she asks. "Help me. Please. You like me, don't you? I'll do anything. _Really_ anything, I mean it!"

"Shut up." He's going to be sick. "What sort of man do you take me for?"

"No! I don't mean— I've always thought you were handsome, really! I'm sorry if it seemed like I was avoiding you, I just—"

"Clayton is a bloody moron," he snaps at her. "You look like my _sister_ , all right? Just shut it before you make me throw up on you."

Before she can come up with a response for _that_ , the chains are secure and he just has to hold her head still, which he can thankfully accomplish by covering her mouth.

—

The whole system is a waste of time and resources. Watched or not, restrained or not, Harrowed or not, no mage will ever truly cease to be dangerous until they are dead or Tranquil. Meredith knows it. Everyone knows it. For some reason, though, no one is ever willing to speak plainly.

That's not entirely true. Ser Cullen Rutherford, for example, does not seem to be capable of _stopping_ himself from speaking plainly — which Meredith found so refreshing when she first met him that she promoted him to Knight-Captain almost immediately. That drew the ire of the native Kirkwallers serving at the Gallows, most of whom were older and more senior than he was at the time. It wasn't the most politic choice she's ever made, certainly, but Meredith thinks she's earned a bit of indulgence now and then.

Ser Otto Alrik, too, has taken some admirable initiative, but he's an unsubtle idiot and entirely _too_ self-indulgent. Every mage in the Marches Tranquil within a matter of years! If that were remotely possible, doesn't he think it would have been done by now? No, he won't last long, not with that egregious a lack of perspective.

Though she has to admit, it would be nice if things were that simple. Elsa has been an absolute blessing to Meredith, which is nothing short of miraculous as an outcome for a girl who was born cursed. She is, as she says, gifted with a knack for organization, and also unflaggingly patient at dealing with people whom Meredith can never manage to talk to without getting a headache. More than that, though, she has an almost nostalgic presence, tall and pale and solid. Just having her around puts Meredith at ease in a way she hasn't been for many, many years.

Except for when it doesn't. Except for when Meredith's memories of Amelia turn bitter enough to make her choke. _How could she do that to us? How could everything we did for her not be enough?_ Meredith can never quite manage to stop asking herself those questions, even though she knows there was no real reason. Her family gone, her childhood gone, her ability to ever, _ever_ feel entirely safe gone — all for no reason. All because her sister went crazy.

"Is there anything you require?" Elsa asks when she enters Meredith's office one day to find her hunched over her desk trying to swallow down the old, stale rage.

Meredith rounds on her, grabs her by the collar of her robes, and hurls her against the wall. Her skull hits the stone with a satisfying _crack_ , and she slumps to the ground. Her head lolls forward against her chest, and her long, pale, _familiar_ hair falls limply over her face.

"I do not understand," she says after a moment, lifting her head to look up at Meredith with empty eyes. "Have I displeased you in some way?"

Meredith feels the tide of anger receding and takes a deep breath. "No."

"Is there something you want from me?"

What she really wants is to go back in time and make all of this _not be_. But she can't have that, ever. All she can do is safeguard the future. "No. Only your continued presence."

When the past gets to be too much, she'll just have to placate herself with illusions.

—

Nearly everyone Anders grew up with is dead. Harrowings, suicides, sometimes just disappearances with no obvious explanation — and then Uldred's bloody stupid failure of an uprising took out the ones who had survived the gauntlet.

He almost never actually saw his friends die, not before Karl. Sometimes, when someone took their own life in a common area, he'd stumble across the body. More often, he wouldn't know that anything was wrong until the Tranquil came into the dormitory to strip the now-vacant bed.

The one exception was Solona Amell, because apparently the Templars decided they didn't want her to disappear. There were too many rumors floating around about what she had done, and they wanted to leave no ambiguity regarding how that had worked out for her.

Anders hadn't known her very well. She was ten years younger than him, after all. But his time in the apprentice dormitories had overlapped with hers by a few years. She'd been brought in just as he was starting to "settle down" — meaning, to convince himself that struggling defiantly against the inevitable wasn't worth the pain on Karl's face when he uncovered a fresh set of scars on Anders' back — so he'd been around to offer her the occasional word of encouragement as she learned the basics of both magic and a life of imprisonment. She seemed to appreciate it. The little ones usually did seem to appreciate whenever someone older showed them a bit of warmth and kindness.

The Templars gathered everyone into the Great Hall, then dragged her out in chains and ran her through. She was screaming the whole time — not wordlessly in terror, but because she had things to say.

"Through the Victim's Door, past the dungeons, there's a hole in the wall — don't know how quickly they can fix it, or move the phylacteries, but there's a way in right now!

"He's not a maleficar! He was always completely in control! Everything he did was for Lily, not for himself! He didn't make a move until they threatened her!

"He got out! He's free, and they're not going to catch him! It isn't impossible! Listen to me!"

The words kept coming even when the Templars shoved her to her knees and the blade passed through her chest. They spilled from her mouth along with the blood, until she choked and shuddered and went still.

Anders did nothing. He watched it all, and he did nothing. Every mage in the tower watched. Solona had risked everything to save her friend, and not one person did the same for her.

He will not be complacent any longer. He will make no more excuses, neither for himself nor for anyone else. He knows this beyond a doubt when he feels Ser Alrik die in his hands. It is good, it is right, and it is _not enough_.

"We'll kill them all, I promise," Hawke tells him, and he believes her. For a moment, the world seems to be moving straightforwardly toward what it should be.

It cannot last.

"Stay away from me, demon!" the mage girl shrieks at him — and he is not a demon, he is _not_ , she is repeating their lies, willingly, though they are dead and cannot compel her. The Templars claim anyone who opposes them is wicked and deranged, that the suffering and death they deal out is justified. The slothful accept their lies, whether they believe them or not, and allow the deadly farce to continue. They cower, as Anders cowered, as this girl is cowering now. He hates them. He hates himself. He hates _her_ — and that hatred, at least, can be acted upon.

But when he goes to act, when he stands over the girl and lifts his hand and gathers the lightning around it, suddenly Hawke is there, grabbing his wrist, shouting at him, horrified. Her anger is righteous and pure, and in that moment it has turned on _him_. "She is the reason you're fighting, Anders!" she tells him, and he believes her.

The light goes out and he falls to his knees, his insides jerking as he returns to a world where uncertainty exists. He wants to scream, to vomit, to die, to run. He settles on that last one. That's the only thing he's ever really been good at, isn't it?

Hawke doesn't let him run far. When she catches up to him, she tells him that she spoke to Ella briefly, gave her coin for a ship out of Kirkwall, and advised her to make her visit home a quick one.

Ella. The mage's name is Ella, and she cares about her family enough to carry on with her plan to see them even after she was almost killed or worse. She is so brave, and so resourceful to have made her way into the tunnels without the help of the Underground.

"You should have gone with her," he tells Hawke. "Walked her home. Kept her safe."

"I was more worried about you."

"I don't deserve—" Anything. Anders doesn't deserve _anything_ good, but especially not Hawke's time and care. How can she still not see that, after what she just witnessed?

"Shh." Hawke wraps her arms around him and leans her head into his chest. "We got through it. We did some good today. We'll do more. After Alrik, how hard can Meredith be?"

He really doesn't deserve her. But, Maker forgive him, he _needs_ her. The cause needs her. She is someone who refuses to stand aside and watch, and he cannot lie to her by telling her that she should.


End file.
